The other night I strolled up to the nearby Borders Bookshop to pass the time in a bit of book-browsing. As I was getting ready to leave, I saw a lady setting up a table with flyers about Tolkien and children’s fantasy literature. I asked her what it was about, and she said they were setting up for the celebration of the latest Harry Potter book to be published. "Well, I’d stay for Tolkien, but not Harry Potter," I remarked, suddenly remembering that the Canadian novelist Michael D. O’Brien was due to appear on CNN tonight in a discussion about the Potter phenomenon. O’Brien, a faithful Catholic who has published, through Ignatius Press, a series of apocalyptic novels that warn of a totalitarian New World Order takeover of Canada – and the U.S. – and the whole "developed" world -- was identified by the CNN Powers-That-Be as one of the "religious objectors" to Harry Potter. This broadcast was due to start in about ten minutes, so I hurried home to watch it.

Later in this posting I plan to discuss several of these novels, especially Plague Journal, Eclipse of the Sun, and Father Elijah, as they have great bearing on the subject of the struggle between good and evil in our time.

When I arrived home, contrary to my usual custom, I switched on the TV and realized, once again, why I no longer watch television. Watching the CNN program for the forty minutes it approximately took in order to get to the 10-second segment with Michael O’Brien only reaffirmed my loathing for the medium. Surely there can be no further misunderstanding. Everything good and decent in human life depends upon the process of the maturation of the powers of thought, a process ultimately dependent upon knowledge of the good and assent to it. The unfolding of the cognitive faculty and its development and refinement into the free exchange, or at least the airing, of ideas, is dependent upon a basis of the moral which is, so to speak, like the submerged portion of an iceberg. But the Titanic Powers of modern society have collided into this iceberg by continuing to acknowledge only the visible portion of this iceberg while ignoring its depths, which demand long years of effort to plumb. Thus television, the medium par excellence of the Titanic Powers, is utterly and incontrovertibly hostile to the act of thinking -- not because it ignores thinking or thinking people, but because it merely crowds them out, places them as "one view among others." The hesitations and qualifications that are the inevitable accompaniment to any act of refined thinking lack the dramatic certitudes of the shallow. On television, the shallow shine, while the thoughtful swim – if they are fortunate for a few seconds – before they sink.

Television has thus become the instrument of the mobocracy, the tabernacle of anti-politics. For there can be no politics where people cannot reason, and where people cannot reason they will be persuaded by more forceful means. Michael O’Brien, pinned between the chirpy Paul Zahn and a balding American professorial pro-Potter enthusiast, managed to say that the Harry Potter books depict a world of exerting power over people that is injurious to human freedom. But what chance that his message could be heard, given the long segue to his brief comment – a build-up showing hordes of Potter-crazed youth dressed up like wizards, in London, Edinburgh, New York, and capitals of literature in the Western World? And then, the pictures of the smiling and triumphant author, J.D. Rowling, who was of course on hand to acknowledge all that was good in her books that skyrocketed her from destitute single mom to fame and fortune? Here is a dream, a fairy tale come true, and the New World Order must be sure to churn out a certain number of these, so that the millions of unemployed and underemployed will not altogether lose hope. J.D. Rowling, if she had not existed, would have had to be invented. And perhaps – despite her undeniable talent in writing all of these Potter-sellers – she really was invented, as a test run of the New World Order spirituality described by Lee Penn in his book False Dawn: The United Religious Initiative and the Quest for One-World Religion.

This New World Order religious ideology was epitomized by the words of Maurice Strong, a Canadian multimillionaire, senior advisor to the World Bank, and apostle of global governance: "We are gods now, gods in charge of our own destiny, and gods can’t be capricious."

Evidently, the global governors like to think big. The Episcopal Bishop Swing, promoter of the United Religious Initiative and syncretism (essentially reducing the main points of the world’s religions to a harmless set of propositions) thinks that a "more inclusive set of global visions" will create "a common purpose for all religious and spiritual movements," thus ushering in "a spirit of colossal energy… born in the loins of the earth." Hey Swing, ever heard of Lucifer?

The ideology of religious syncretism uses ideal of equality to undermine the structures of liberty. By merging all religions into one, you undermine the  sources of the moral law from which people draw the strength and understanding to raise objections to the machinations of elites engaged in global financial manipulation -- machinations performed with the unfailing assistance of the shallow and sycophantic media. Syncretism thus upholds the saturnine order of Entropy, symbolized by Saturn-Chronos, wielding the sickle, who devours his own children. Those who wield the sickle have figured out that the most effective means of assuring their domination is to sever from man the possibility of the life of thought, but in such a way that the anesthetized remains will feel nothing and understand even less. For how can that which fails to develop ever be experienced as a loss? Perhaps for this reason Henry See remarks that ‘the truth’ is not a noun, but a verb: "To refuse a lie is to stand against the mechanical nature of ourselves and the world, to stand firm against the descending current of the stream of entropy…" This activity or process of "standing against the mechanical part of ourselves" was something which, in the Old World, we called thinking. In the New World Order we no longer even have this refuge. The things being enacted through convulsions of symbolism have not been taken through any digestive process of thought.

I have read, for instance, of a new morbid condition in the world. There are people who feel that they are, or should be, amputees. There was a case in Scotland of a man who besought his doctor to remove his perfectly healthy leg – and the doctor obliged him.

Truly, we are symbol-wielding beings. If we do not struggle to ground our thinking powers, that is, take up the 'legs' or the act of standing, of understanding, into thought,   the sickle-wielder will come along and do the job for us. The result is a sort of 'symbolical' history spattered on the canvas of the world - man who has lost the power to create future.  

Part II: Protestant Trajectory

A novel, to the extent that it is the result of an authentic vision, has a way of pulling at the reins of the author and of developing in ways the author could not have foreseen – hence the "novelty." Michael O’Brien’s three novels set in a Canada that has been seized by a powerful, though nearly invisible,  politically-correct globalist elite – Plague Journal, Eclipse of the Sun, and Father Elijah (this last one is set mainly in Rome) have this quality of the visionary rather than the programmatic. For this reason these novels, inspired by a Catholic imagination, present a striking contrast to the "Left Behind" series of the duo-team Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. It is significant that the "Left Behinds" represent a collaboration rather than true authorship. I am not in a position to comment extensively on these books, having only managed to get through one of them. The propagandistic and contrived nature of these fictional tracts is in itself the most telling commentary on the impoverished condition of Protestant vision. This massive series of end-time fantasies show several important weaknesses that have inhered in Protestantism from its inception – weaknesses quite apart from the "premillenialist" theology that informs them. The "Left Behinds" show a Protestantism that has virtually collapsed into a kind of post-Christian Judaism. And again, this judaized Christianity is something quite other than the avidity for the Zionist cause everywhere evident in "Left Behind."

The Christian religion is not natural to mankind. It preaches a non-tribal and non-ethnic love where man's tendency is to be tribal and ethnic. It insists that man has a defective nature which, if not taken into account, will cause deformations in social arrangements despite the best of intentions. And yet it casts this somber message in a teaching of hope,  that man was made in the "Image of God" and carries the love of God if he will but make the effort to contact it. It stresses that the precondition for contacting the love of God is repentance. Anthroposophically-inspired Christians call this "repentance" by its New Testament name – "a change of thinking" – metanoia. The Quakers have a beautiful expression for it – "tenderness," or "becoming tender." Nevertheless, all those who are in some fashion communicative with the Christian tradition seem to agree that for the soul to take a step beyond the given, beyond the natural, some inner change is demanded. "Pagan confidence" gives way to an inner doubt and inner receptiveness – a realization that, at least in some form, one is not and cannot be self-sufficient.

After this initial line of agreement, however, people take different paths to the transcendent.  Historically the Protestants embraced the doctrine of sola Scriptura --  "by Scripture alone" -- as sufficient for "justification by faith." Protestantism has been a movement into schism and sectarianism and has divided into many different groups and confessions. Catholicism maintained the structure of Christian supernaturalism on a firm three-legged basis of Scripture, Tradition and Teaching Authority (Magisterium) – a prudential concession to historical realities. This structure has enabled the Catholic Church to survive for 2,000 years more or less intact. The stability of Catholicism has often been a source of great consolation to Protestant converts, who have experienced the schismatic impulse first-hand. Cardinal Newman has a line somewhere that to be "deep in history" is to become Catholic.

Protestantism effectively knocked two legs off from under the support system of Christianity in its insistence on "sola Scriptura." The threefold idea later metamorphosed into political arrangements – in the ideals of the French Revolution (liberty, equality, fraternity) and in the executive, legislative, and judicial arrangement of the U.S. constitutional government. The bloody results of the betrayal of the French Revolution are known to history, and the outcome of the American constitutional experiment is at this point open to much doubt. The threefold idea is a powerful guarantor of stability, but its stability has only really been proved where its structure supports a supernatural ideal. Where it is not in itself subject to a higher spiritual ideal, it seems to have a tendency to implode into various forms of ideology, bundling its frustrated supernaturalism into an especially toxic mix of power without authority, the exaltation of appetites at the expense of self-constraint and thought, and the willful confusion of license with liberty.

In any case, the removal of the underpinnings of supernatural religion has had many repercussions in the historical world, as we know. No question that an enormous energy flowed into human intellectual and appetitive (economic) endeavors with consequences we are seeing today. I am quite convinced that the fossil-fuel and hydrocarbon blow-out that has made possible our technical civilization and whose exhaustion may ultimately be the means of its ruin, had its roots in the Protestant loosening of the virtues of self-restraint. The Eastern Fathers had taught for centuries the methods and ways of how the human person may contact, channel and direct his energies for the purpose of coming into touch with the work of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps these teachings ultimately formed the basis for understanding, among other things, education and machinery. For the self-containment of energy, or rather how a machine can be operated from an energy source using the principle of self-containment, is of course fundamental to all operations in the material world. The principle of the self-restraint of energy is also basic to any work of education, for the energies in a human person have to be repeatedly gathered, concentrated, and directed in order to prepare the ground for the act of thinking. It is very telling that in the Modern Age this principle became so little understood that self-restraint became identified with "repression," which implies a coercive or unconscious element. We should not then be surprised today that President Bush, when asked why he felt assured that his planned invasion of Iraq was correct, replied "…my instincts… my instincts." This movement toward the re-instinctivization of man is a result of Protestantized education, in which the mechanical metaphor has been foremost. Heidegger expressed great alarm about this "calculative thinking" -- he believed it would lead to an age of "total thoughtlessness"  in which "man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature [as a] meditative being."  This point is reached when human intelligence, as calculative thinking, exists solely to serve the animal or the instinctual -- when  the "impulse of animality and the ratio of humanity become identical" 

In the 1990’s this program of calculative thinking allied with the instinctual burst into public view as an implicit political program with the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History (1992). In his interview-article, "The Great Disruption," (Atlantic, May, 1999) Francis Fukuyama was asked how we can rebuild social capital in the future. He replied: "We human beings are by nature designed to create moral rules and social order for ourselves… This insight is extremely important because it means that social capital will tend to be generated by human beings as a matter of instinct."

It is astounding that something like this could have been written in our time, and more astounding yet that so many presumably intelligent people could believe it. It is nothing less than the entire repudiation of the moral tradition of the human race.  In a redeemed human nature, instinct could be trusted in this way, perhaps, but it is a moot point because we don’t live in a redeemed world. Fukuyama later remarks that "human reason" can "spontaneously generate solutions to problems of social cooperation." Thus between instinct, which always does the same thing, and spontaneity, which always does things differently, you have magically generated an Explanation for Everything – although Fukuyama later admitted he was stumped when the interviewer asked him "how social capital was generated in specific circumstances" and not others. Voilà the great neoconservative cogitator who, in substituting Nature and Instinct for the work of education, effort, prayer, repentance, stings of conscience, labors for the good, self-correction, tradition, religious and moral teaching, philosophy, example, challenge, humor, satire, art, and argument, and everything else under these headings I cannot think of at the moment – shows how far fallen into superstition and magical thinking the protestantized educational regime has led us. From thence it is no great leap to George Bush clutching his Bible while babbling  that he is "in touch with his Father" with his decisions of State.

I doubt that Protestant educationists were aware of the insidious nature of this "creeping instinctivization." For my purpose it is enough to inquire how the doctrine of sola Scriptura resonated in fields having to do with imagination and vision. Unless there is an ongoing work of teaching and elucidation, what is to prevent the body of Scripture from dissolving into superstition? By what means can one assure the continuity of Revelation?

Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) wrote in his memoir Milestones that the question of his doctoral thesis was just how different the concept of revelation was to the men of the late Middle Ages. He says that to St. Bonaventure, the idea of referring to Sacred Scripture as revelation would have been "unthinkable." For, to the men of that time,

Thus ‘dogma,’ that chief bugaboo of the Modern Age, carried by the threefold structure of the Church, is an intellectual formulation that protects and sustains the dynamic action of Revelation. Like a homeopathic potency, this Revelation is both incredibly forceful and incredibly delicate, and as ‘participatory’ as breathing itself. Protestantism exploded all these structures, and in so doing, led the way to dynamic initiating events. We are still living in this history and cannot see them in all their fullness. Troubling portents do come to view, however, in that we may wonder whether initial historical dynamism is giving way to a kind of machine dynamism -- which is to say, stagnation -- just "more of the same." The Australian writer  John Leonard  once characterized modernity as that which is "resistant to change in all of its features." -- a characterization hardly flattering to the way modernists like to think of themselves.  I don't know if the question of the possible link between "machine inventiveness" and historical stagnation has ever been properly explored, much less posed. But the time to pose the question has arrived, because there are portents that not only the energy basis for the machine civilization is coming to a point of exhaustion, but its intellectual capital – to borrow Fukuyama’s terminology – may also be reaching a point of exhaustion as well. This is not to say that science has understood everything about the physical world. By no means. But the relationship of knowledge to reward has changed – there is more to know about less and less – and in consequence the relation of science to society has changed. Science has long passed the border of neutrality and exists as a power-structure in its own right, and to the extent that it fails to heed the moral, geological and social constraints that apply to any human enterprise, it has become an engine for corruption.

The extremity and restlessness of our period is owing to the fact that,  marching in step with Progress and calculative reason,  the inheritors of the Protestant imagination fear that their revelation might only be a mask for gross superstition. Fearing to be "Left Behind," this imagination,  when tinged with the religious, invents garish scenarios with a ruthless demarcation between the saved and the damned. It is a parody of grace, a kind of anti-grace, when the world goes to hell. The Protestant trajectory culminates with a return to a judgmentalism of the kind condemned by Jesus in the New Testament.  John Harris, in A Body Without Breath: How Right and Left Have Stifled Moral Reason Within the Christian Faith, asks the unsettling question whether the protestant evangelical faith actually sets itself in opposition to the good through its notion of the action of grace. He complains that the ‘saved"

The doctrine of  sola Scriptura has had repercussions far beyond the theological field. It has proved to be a rickety structure, insufficiently strong to resist the darkening wave of evil that is crushing the life from our world and raising the Lord of Entropy from his saturnine depths.

III. Michael O'Brien's Catholic Apocalypses 

August 4, 2005

Michael O'Brien's novels depict a Western world that has forsaken the Cross for the double-cross. Plague Journal and Eclipse of the Sun are set in Canada and depict a totalitarian takeover of that nation, and more generally of North America. Father Elijah is set mainly in Rome, although its events concern all of Europe and the Middle East.

O’Brien is a faithful Catholic, father of a family, novelist and writer as well as artist and painter. A journalist of the "mainstream" (read liberal) Catholic press recently referred to him as a "prolix apocalypticist" – perhaps as a way of disdaining the message. I suppose if one refuses to be disturbed by the events of the present day, "prolixity" would be the first thing to occur to say about these novels – at least the second and third, with Eclipse weighing in at 855 pages and Elijah at 596 pages. It seems a fairly superficial way to go, though, when there are so many other things that come to mind about these books even before one tackles their content and plot.

First of all, the difference between the "Catholic apocalypse" and those of the Protestant variety amounts to "no contest." The difference in literacy, in thought and feeling, in the human believability of the characters, in the complexity of the moral vision allied with the sense of truth and obedience to the realm of objective fact – the difference is overwhelming. By comparison the Protestant apocalypse is a mere scheme, a framework upon which to set out an ideology.  Michael O'Brien writes that "It is important to remember... that a truly Catholic 'end-times' novel does not so much attempt to predict the future as it strives to raisde the essential questions that must be asked by every generation." The Catholic Apocalypse is an encounter with human destiny, meditations on history

This overwhelming difference is surprising because, if nothing else, the Protestant era has been very hospitable to the production of great novels. For some reason George Eliot’s Middlemarch comes to mind, but there are many others following the late Victorian age into the Modern period. The literary fictions of the Protestant age exemplify what is best in it,  probing, with great thoroughness,  the relation of the individual to society. As long as Western society retained something of its communal and religious character, the Protestant imagination felt free to explore it, and it did so abundantly. But once the West was assailed by disintegrationist philosophies of modernism the Protestant imagination began to lose its grip. Symptomatic of this is the fact that the  "Left Behind" series of books carry nothing of the inner richness and history of the Protestant novel.

By contrast, if Michael O’Brien’s novels are any indication of the vitality of the Catholic imagination, apocalyptic fiction shows signs of moving to another level. The term "apocalyptic" or "religious" fiction does not do it justice because the "apocalypse" has moved into the mainstream. Apocalypse has become history. And this is because Protestant societies no longer seem to have a common discourse of the imagination, and the citizens of the Western nations no longer seem to carry a vision of self-understanding transcending the manipulated imagery to which all are subject. Individuals still possess moral capacity, imagination, and empathy, of course, but their self-development is an individual rather than a social achievement. The common language, which developed the concept of the rule of law and the restraints upon power, seems to have broken down into techno-barbarism and totalitarianism.   Thus a "religious fiction" which sets out to capture this dynamic is not merely "religious" – it is the dynamic itself. It is the recasting of history into terms of the loss of moral imagination and the struggle to recover it.  .

Given these collisions of protestant imaginative exhaustion and their results in a sclerotic politics, St. Augustine’s words in De libero arbitrio seem apposite: "The man who, knowing the right, fails to do it, loses the power to know what is right; and the man who, having the power to do right, is unwilling, loses the power to do what he wills." I believe these words repay deep attention concerning the condition of our society today. A kind of impotence has fallen upon the Man of the West, who has sunk into moral infantilism while surrounding himself with formidable weapons and endlessly satiating himself with "dinosaur blood," the oil whose extraction proves ever more costly and ruinous. To call Michael O’Brien’s novels "apocalyptic" may be technically correct. But if "apocalypse" is the order of the day, it would be truer to call them prophetic histories. 

August 11, 2005

I open my reflections with Father Elijah. This novel deals with the Jewish convert to Catholicism, David Shaeffer, who became the Carmelite priest, Father Elijah. The novel opens with a summons by the Pope to Father Elijah, who is living in Palestine,   to come to Rome for a delicate mission. The Pope wishes the priest to pay a visit to the President of the European Union for the ostensible purpose of bringing certain archaelogical matters concerning the composition of the New Testament to the latter's attention. But the actual purpose of the mission is deeper. Is it to determine "whose side" this President is on? - to ascertain whether this President -- considered by all a man of peace, a scholar, a wonder-worker, a smooth and brilliant political statesman and stellar success in business and in every enterprise he puts his hand to - may confess to the Lordship of Jesus Christ? Yes - the purpose is to ascertain and, if possible, to convert him.

This mission, which may seem to carry a somewhat antiquated flavor, is a matter of no small importance to the fate of the world. To us today it seems quaint - especially we Americans who are rightly contemptuous of politicians who call themselves "Christian."   For this reason  the question it poses would be so much harder to ask in America. On the American side of modernity, "Christ" lives in a fashion, but stripped of nearly every moral, imaginative, rational and institutional support - becoming a kind of post-tribal nationalist and emotionalist idol. To a thoroughly secularized Europe, however, the question bears the force of history. The glaring omission of Christianity in the Constitution of the European Union shows the discomfort and bad faith of Europe with respect to its origins and heritage.  The old heresy of Marxism wished to liberate man in history. The new heresy has to do with the attempt to liberate history itself - to declare history itself exempt from all gravitational forces.

Thus the Pope's mission may have an antique flavor, but it has to do with sounding the depths of this modern heresy, really a renewed form of Manichaeaism. And this is anything but "antique." But concerning the first part of the mission - "Whose side is he on?" -- this question, too, may be antique, but the dread of the present is that it might not be. Liberations, to the extent that they represent intellectual concoctions rather than moral realizations, have a way of falling away, one after another, leaving a greater and greater operational field for Beings classically termed "hindering" or "diabolical." The field of moral realization, on the other hand, is composed of all those solid bodies that prevent the perfect manifestation of one's will - one's own body, to begin with, but then those customs of marriage and family and childrearing, those tiresome restraints of laws (to our modern Caesars bent upon subverting them) and all the necessities of eating and learning and waiting. Modernity,  the impulse to demolish restraining barriers, thus leads to the next phase of history, which is the encounter with the Hinderer Himself. This is the Being, known as the Deceiver, or Accuser,  who says -- why not demolish the final hindrance, the distinction between Good and Evil? --  "as if to overcome the philosophical problem of evil by doing away with the good." (Jeff Wells) 

 Satan's ultimate prize, says one character in Father Elijah,  is "to seduce all mankind into his rebellion. And to do it in the name of the good."  There are many such conversations in this book - in this one occurs when Father Elijah converses with an old sinner in Warsaw, the city to which he had come to attend a "World Unitas" conference of Eurocrats. Father Elijah, in his travels in the Eurocrat circles, has encountered a lady, a lawyer, Anna Benedetti, who,  although not a Christian, remains skeptical of the aims of the "Unitas" movement. "It revolves around a single vision of existence," she tells him. "It is the ancient worldview of monism. Monists believe that all divisions are ultimately illusion, all conflicts can be negotiated, all dogmatism is essentially a violation of freedom." Anna Benedetti, both in her personal as well as her professional life, sees through the improvised character of this ideology to the horrifying realities it masks. It is a vision she pays for with her life.

During their attendance at Conference in Warsaw,  Father Elijah takes Anna Benedetti to the site of his former captivity. The youth David Shaeffer had been sheltered by an old bookseller during the War -- a part of the story addressed in  O'Brien's novel, Sophia House.  As the two poke around the attic of the old house, Anna tells Father Elijah-- "Isn't it a curious thing that you should feel such freedom in the site of your captivity, while you felt such oppression in the Palace of Culture, where every second word is freedom?"

This is an astute observation about the nature of human existence as a moral problem.  It is only the materialist who think he can arrive at his goal directly: "freedom," "tolerance," "diversity," "democracy," "equality," etc. These slogans, spouted by True Believers of all stripes, always lead to ruin and destruction in the end because human life is not a physical but a moral and spiritual problem. Where the spiritual world is concerned, to arrive at a destination is to travel in the opposite direction, and to obtain a goal is to renounce it. In the physical world more is more; in the spiritual, the least is the greatest.  In the physical world to make something lighter is to remove things from it; in the world of spiritual understanding, to 'enlighten' the mind is by adding to it.  Understanding how the laws of the physical and moral actually work should suffice to prevent one from falling into simplistic notions like the "conjunction of opposites" that Jungians and New Agers love to quote. There can be no "conjunction"  where the operations concerned are absolutely contrary to each other. But it is surprising how little this is understood.

 Father Elijah's mission unfolds through many incidents and characters, spiritual and worldly, who fill the canvas of Rome and Europe. His mission - to convert the president, to save his soul - is a failure. And yet in the end Father Elijah does succeed in having a confrontation with the President - in which the latter removes his mask. The darling of the world is revealed for what he is and who he works for. As one character puts it, referencing Cardinal Newman's essays, "Antichrist will bite us, but it won't be with fangs. He will blaspheme, but it will be in the most elegant language. He will deny that Jesus is the only Christ and deny that he is God. In the place of the Savior, he will erect himself as an anti-icon, an embodiment of human greatness. He will lead mankind to adore its own ego, and eventually, to adore Satan."

This is the final clearing -- where there can be no vision, because there can be no view other than Self. In this encounter the President lets loose with a stream of blasphemies, and shouts -- "I and no other shall bring mankind into the fullness of its destiny... no other!" Father Elijah implores the President to make the final choice -- "I adjure you, Satan, to leave him!" --- and at this,  "The President's eyes rolled up and the whites of them showed. His mouth opened and closed like a fish cast up on a shore, gasping for breath..."   The high drama of the moment is accentuated by the presence of the angelic boy, Rafael, who has guided Father Elijah  safely into the president's well-guarded island retreat, the former mountain palace of the Emperor Tiberius. With the President lying on the floor between them in a state of collapse, the boy says to Father Elijah: "He will awaken in a few minutes... Then he must choose."

All of the powers of the Heavenly Hosts are not greater than this simple power, the freedom to choose. Truly to understand this fact of spiritual-moral reality is to go deep into the mysteries of the world and of mankind, balanced precariously in the ineffable graces of Providence.

August 15, 2005

Eclipse of the Sun and Plague Journal:

The plot of Eclipse of the Sun, reduced to its bare essence, concerns the struggle of eight-year-old Arrow Delaney to escape the clutches of the powerful modern State. Told in this way, the flight of the Arrow in the face of the totalitarian menace sounds implausible, even incomprehensible. Perhaps the very incomprehensibility of the biblical "Not a sparrow falls to the ground without knowledge of the Father" gives this book its particular compelling power – the merciful totality of God contrasted with the ruthless totalitarianism of men.

The background to the story of Arrow’s persecution by the State is told in Plague Journal, the preceding novel. Nathaniel Delaney, Arrow’s father, is the editor of a small-town newspaper whose editorials against abortion and other idols of modern political-correctness made him an Enemy of the State. Nathaniel’s wife, Maya, had left him, taking Arrow, the youngest child still an infant, with her. The two older children remain with their father. Plague Journal tells the story of the State’s attempt to abduct these two children from their father on a trumped-up child abuse charge. Warned by an agent of the government, Maurice, a man known to him personally, Nathaniel escapes with Tyler and Zoe over rugged Canadian terrain. Nathaniel succeeds in hiding the children with his grandfather, an old Indian living in the remote mountains, but it is at the cost of his own life.

This Maurice – an individual perhaps modelled on Canadian multimillionaire Maurice Strong, a key player in the "World Religions Initiative" -- had alerted Nathaniel to the danger of his situation in what he later saw in himself as a moment of weakness. Maurice L’Oraison had grown up in the same town and Nathaniel’s mother had been his benefactor - a teacher who had given him spiritual and intellectual encouragement. Since those days Maurice chose another path. He had risen high in the bureaucracy of Internal Security, the arm of the Canadian-globalist elite aiming at total control of the country. Total control means the destruction of all competing sources of authority – the natural and the moral law, traditions of democratic governance, and genuine religion, most especially Christianity and particularly the Catholic Church. Maurice’s "moment of weakness" consisted in a sort of half-acknowledged sense that perhaps a few remnants of the faithful ought to be left unmolested in the New World Order – almost like specimens in a laboratory – just for experimental purposes. In the agenda of State control, comprising "the dialectic between individual freedom and social order" – if the State turns out to be wrong, the individuals allowed to escape through the meshes of the system will become the "seed for an alternative future." Or so Maurice says, in the call he made that alerted Nathaniel to his peril and set off the events in the book.

Maurice figures prominently in Eclipse of the Sun, which opens in the setting of a New-Age commune, to which Arrow’s mother has fled. What began with peace and light has, in the course of a few years, degenerated to drug trading, sex abuse and human sacrifice. Maya has begun to see the light, or rather, see through it, and tells her anxious son, Arrow, that "they will leave soon." Alas, it was not to be. Arrow wanders into the woods, Maya is in the commune when it is bombed by agents of the government – that, and a neighboring convent as well. Father Andrei, the priest who had accompanied Nathaniel and assisted him with delivering the two older children to safe haven, has come to this part of the country to visit the convent Sisters, formerly his spiritual flock, and to find Arrow for the purpose of reuniting him with his family.

Father Andrei and Arrow, as witnesses to the Waco-style incineration of the commune and the convent, are for that reason highly dangerous to a State which has propagandized the events as the work of terrorists or drug traffickers. How the real is betrayed and deceived by a media which has lost all claims to be independent is a theme frequently brought up in this book. The manipulation of minds is one of the chief weapons of the New World Order to subvert and corrupt the human conscience. How Father Andrei leads the child through dangers and temporary refuges, and how they are finally parted – with Arrow salvaged precariously in the home of a quirky but kind old lady junk dealer and with Andrei captured, held prisoner, and finally murdered by Maurice L’Oraison: all of these developments are described in a highly complex, interwoven dramatic narrative, with many supporting characters and incidents laced with reflections about Catholic faithfulness, philosophy, history, the nature of sin, the unity of the Holy Spirit, the action of grace.

For purposes of this review I want to focus on the question of how this Catholic apocalyptic novel would strike people who are not Catholic and not even perhaps Christian, but who are aware of the existence of the globalist financial network, the massive abuses of power, lack of accountability, threats to freedom of speech, inexplicable disappearances or sudden deaths of political figures or journalists who dissent from the party line, and apparently ‘staged’ or at least peculiar ‘terrorist incidents’ or disasters that always seem to benefit some government program for the commencement of war or the imposition of surveillance, power, or control. For there are – yet, still – many responsible, concerned people whose voices and concerns are to be found on websites, weblogs, chat rooms, forums, and even occasionally surfacing in the media. People for whom the forms and traditions of democratic liberalism continue to mean something, people who believe in elections, in representative governments, a free press. There are such people remaining, even a few in public life.

One can term such people ethical secularists. They would be surprised to hear that the main item on the agenda of the globalist elite is "to provoke a formidable social cataclysm, which will show clearly to the nations the effects of absolute atheism." Maurice interjects this phrase in a conversation with Father Andrei, who is being held prisoner in one of the cells of Internal Security. Father Andrei, an old man who has seen much and was once held prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, and who is not surprised by much, is surprised by this. "I do not understand," he replies. Maurice says: "Understand this. We are not atheists. I am not an atheist." He then goes on to describe the projected "harvest of the disintegration of the old order. We call it critical instability, management by crisis. The mass of men will find themselves unable to defend themselves against criminals and terrorists, hunger and disease. The vast majority will have become disillusioned with Christianity, for your god hasn’t come, you see…"

Such an agenda, that of the Revolutionary State, will prepare mankind for the reception of "the Light that has remained in obscurity until our age, known only by the elect." Father Andrei realizes that Maurice is referring to Lucifer and protests to Maurice that "Lucifer is Satan" – which Maurice dismisses as a religious myth. His Lightbringer is the "elder brother" of Christ. Those familiar with New Age writings will recognize the influence of David Spangler and Barbara Marx Hubbard in Maurice’s utopian program, which is "to shape mankind in the image and likeness of the godhead… When the shadow is integrated at last, the world will know peace." For, as Maurice says in another passage, "… the union of good and evil is the fullness of the spectrum."

My point in quoting these passages is to show how far such ideas are from the kind of classical liberal neutrality that has been thought to underlie the appearance of modern states in the democratic era. What we have learned in the latter half of the 20^th century is that neutrality only works in a society held together by Christian sentiments, habits, and values. But the decomposition of this social fabric has been the main internal dynamic of our period. The result has led to a resurgence of religious fundamentalism which, however, has become politically captive to this revolutionary globalist cult.

What Maurice does to Father Andrei, and what he threatens to do with Arrow – who by this time is also a captive in Internal Security – is horrifying. In the end this disciple of ruthless power obeys a mysterious impulse of mercy – for which he, in turn, is later brought down by the State Security he did so much to build up.

Michael O’Brien has written this series of powerful novels to serve as a warning from which he hopes that readers will gain a heightened awareness and some urgent questions. Of the events described in these books, he writes in his postscript that " we do not yet know if they are symptomatic of a larger and possibly terminal illness… If this literary speculation is proved wrong, there will be no one happier about it than I. If it is proved right, there will be no history to recount what happened, to tell us who we were and what we might have been."